industry insight

7 Articles Trending in Security this Week

“For all the benefits of increased agility, flexibility, productivity and convenience provided by IoT and smart devices, the system remains worryingly open to attack.”

The year 2015 has been another exhilarating year in the technology industry, with advances in cloud computing, machine-to-machine (M2M) and the Internet of Things (IoT) all to the fore. Mobility continues to be central to the way we live and enterprises are increasingly thinking ‘mobile first’ in their procurement strategy. Read more >>

“The threat of sanctions of 4 or 5 percent of global revenues, depending on the outcome of Tuesday’s negotiations, should make businesses more mindful of data protection, lawyers and privacy activists say.”

A sweeping reform of fragmented laws governing the uses of personal data set to be agreed by the European Union on Tuesday will force companies to report privacy breaches to authorities or face stiff sanctions. Read more >>

“Among the notable numbers this year: Low tech ‘visual hacking’ proves to be successful nine times out of ten, most websites had at least one serious vulnerability for 150 or more days, click fraud costs businesses $6.3 billion a year in wasted ad money, and oh so much more!”

For its Healthcare Cybersecurity Survey, KPMG polled 223 U.S.-based healthcare IT executives, all with revenues of at least $500 million. Four-fifths of those surveyed said that their information technology has been compromised by cyber-attacks. The executives said that external attackers (65%) and sharing data with third-parties (48%) are their top vulnerabilities. Read more >>

“Acquiring a company in 2016 could also mean acquiring tainted networks and compromised intellectual property. In order to ensure a secure merger, groups will have to increasingly rely on compromise assessments.”

The Apple ecosystem has managed to avoid suffering from many of the worst cybercrimes and exploits over the years. But that could soon change, according to a new report by technology security firm FireEye. In its “Looking Forward: the 2016 Security Landscape,” report, FireEye outlined a future in which Apple products will become a greater focus for cybercriminals. Read more >>

“Traditional approaches to DDoS defence simply cannot catch these sophisticated attacks – only by using an always-on, inline DDoS mitigation solution that automatically removes the threat and provides real-time visibility will IT teams be able to harden their security perimeter to deal with this emerging security threat.” ~Dave Larson, COO at Corero Network Security

Corero Network Security has predicted that 2016 will see a surge in DDoS attacks to act as a smokescreen while hackers attack other parts of the network. The main goal of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is to flood the target with so much traffic that their servers cannot cope with it. Read more >>

“By infecting just one ad network – for example a Yahoo or an AOL – they could distribute malware to potentially hundreds or thousands of sites signed up to that network, with as many as billions of monthly visitors.”

The threat landscape is notorious for its volatility. Specific threats popular with the black hats one year might be eschewed the next, for any number of reasons. Trend Micro predicts that one of the most successful infection vectors around – malvertising – might finally be on the way out in 2016 thanks to a rise… Read more >>

“The Office of Personnel Management sent final notices last week to more than 21 million current and former federal employees and contractors to inform them that the background investigation files used to vet them for security clearances were exposed by the hackers, who U.S. officials have privately said were with the Chinese government.”

The government is notifying journalists who are accredited by federal agencies that their personal information may have been stolen by the Chinese, another sign of the breadth of the massive hack of U.S. computer networks. Read more >>

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